Tag Archives: ALE2011

MyAgileFriends

ALE2011—The WHY: Vision and Purpose

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I started to write about our amazing organisational model two weeks ago. Before that, we created a vision using StrategicPlay, wrote about What’s In It For Me… Yet still people keep asking WHY. As I value the persons asking me highly, I take this as a clear sign that our purpose has still not been visible enough. I’ll give it another go.

MyAgileFriends

Some of My Agile Friends

What Did I Miss Before ALE?

I joined the agile community two years ago. To not repeat myself, I’ll only summarise the outcome, and do a perfection game.

In January 2011, I would have given the Agile Community as I perceived it 5 points out of 10.

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ALE2011—The Story of Organising with a Purpose

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I already wrote about the organisational model, thanked all the contributors… Oana, Franck, Marcin and I were the ALE2011 program sofa fellows and gathered our thoughts about the story in a prezi.  Now you can see our talk about

The Story of Organising ALE2011

It all starts on Skype… (the same post is now available on the ALE2011 site as well)

ALE by Example: The Story of Organizing ALE2011 on Prezi

ALE2011 Awesomeness—lovingly captured by Marcin Floryan

Anarchy with a Purpose—a Model for Emergent Awesomeness

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ALE2011 Awesomeness—lovingly captured by Marcin Floryan

ALE2011 Awesomeness—lovingly captured by Marcin Floryan

An amazing crowd of volunteers organised the first gathering of the Agile Lean Europe network, ALE2011. It happened last week, and being part of the organisation team has not only been an honour and a pleasure, but also the most successful project I was ever involved with. Why? Because the organisation was emergent, the leadership and responsibility distributed, the team passionate and hard-working, and the outcome and created value outstanding, evaluated by the people who attended the unconference.

As I talked with various people before, at and after the event about our organisational model, my understanding of how and why it worked so well grew, so that now I can start summarising and explaining what we did. This will be a multi-post endeavour, which I hope to finish within a week, and I’ll do it in a way that you can give feedback and improve my thoughts along the way. The main step is done: Eelco Rustenburg already found a working title: Anarchy with a Purpose.

This first post will only give you the most important influences and a first insight into how we collaborated, decided, and measured progress. I’ll structure it in a way that each topic can (and will) be elaborated upon in a subsequent post.

The Purpose—Start With WHY

 The gathering had a simple and very compelling purpose: our joint vision to grow a network of sharing practitioners. People volunteered because of this purpose, speakers and participants came and paid and shared because of that purpose, and it was a clear goal to follow while we designed, planned and created the event. WHAT we did and HOW we did it was pulled from that purpose.

Although it was not apparent to me while we did it, I’d like to thank Simon Sinek for the guidance of his quote: “People don’t by WHAT you do, they buy WHY you do it.” Q.E.D.

Pull Value Using Feature Injection

Chris Matts and Liz Keogh developed a technique that I learned from Liz in a BDD tutorial (she’ll do another one soon near Berlin). It’s called Feature Injection and it’s a way to pull valuable capabilities and features from your vision and goal. Without realising it, we organised our sofas according to the intended capabilities of ALE2011:

  • ALE2011 should create learning and sharing experiences (program sofa)
  • ALE2011 should reach out to and integrate local communities (community sofa)
  • ALE2011 should encourage practitioners to come to Berlin and share experiences (participants sofa)
  • ALE2011 should invite participants to bring their families (spouse and kids sofa)

These sofas self-organised and pulled the features they needed from these basic capabilities, like (taking the program sofa as an example):

  • ALE2011 should have short invited talks by speakers from many countries
  • ALE2011 should have an Open Space on every day without anything planned in parallel
  • ALE2011 should have lightning talks with topics submitted by all participants so that everyone prepares something to share

Implementation of these features was highly incremental, similar to a software team pulling stories from these features into development.

Balance Commitments using Real Options

Olav & Chris—Real Option Masters (photo by Ivana Gancheva)

Olav & Chris—Real Option Masters (photo by Ivana Gancheva)

Together with Olav Maassen, Chris Matts applied Real Options to Agile. I had heard and talked about it for a while (especially during the development of the LeanProcrastination idea), but ALE2011 organisation let me truly experience it first hand. We had no other chance.

Because of the short timeframe of organisation (less than 4 months) we had to find a venue fast and commit to a contract early, binding us (thanks to agile42 for taking the legal responsibility for this) to pay 48k€ on August 8th. The hotel was agile enough to adapt these conditions to our options, as registrations and especially payments came in much later than expected. For nearly two months, until the end of August, we did not know if we would break even.

Because of this, we had to be careful not to commit to any other additional costs too early:

  • The hotel’s internet connection,
  • A dinner for all,
  • More rooms for Open Space
  • Technicians videoing all the talks in professional quality.

Yet, the fact that we were not able to commit to “standard features” lead to the emergent discovery of new options that wouldn’t have happened any other way:

  • The amazing guerilla internet connection,
  • The Dinner with a Stranger,
  • Open Space in two big rooms instead of many small ones,
  • A professional cinematographer who is now editing videos of the conference.

The surprising outcome is, apart from our great product, that we now actually have some money left over.

Distributed Cognition, Avoiding a Backlog

We did not keep a backlog. We used Mindmeister, Basecamp. Twitter, email and Skype to communicate, and Google Docs to gather knowledge. I’ve been getting more than 1000 mails a week during the last months, just to give you a feeling (that includes Twitter and Basecamp notifications). We wrote down what we discussed and only decided what to do in the last responsible moment.

That led to a few mistakes (we informed people who had submitted a talk that was not chosen for the program far too late, for instance—sorry!) but in the end I think the experience would have been much less interesting and new had we wrote down what we wanted to do far in advance. Committing to a backlog is a decision that’s not so easy to change, especially with 40 volunteers working from that list. Continually communicating ensured that were reminded of important features, decisions and tasks on time (in most cases) and with the best available information, leading to better informed decisions.

We paid with a few mistakes and increased need of communication, but we earned a more creative, unintended, emergent result which delighted our participants. I think it was worth it!

Real Options again:

  1. Options have value,
  2. Options expire,
  3. Never commit early unless you know why.
Bjarte Bogsnes

Impressions from ALE2011—Day 2

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Bjarte Bogsnes

Bjarte Bogsnes

The second day of ALE2011 started with an amazing keynote by Bjarte Bogsnes on Beyond Budgeting. I had seen a video of his talk at LESS2010 in Helsinki, bought his book… And invited him to come to our unconference. Which he did!

Beyond Budgeting is a topic that deserves its own post, which I will probably write once the video of his keynote is edited and ready to be published. The basic idea is to stop joining targets, forecasts and resource allocation into fixed budgets and to instead use dynamic processes and Theory Y leadership to move forward. Bjarte was as inspiring as expected—I especially liked his example of traffic lights and roundabouts… Giving the people with up-to-date information the means of control.

Wikispeed

Thorsten Kalnin

Thorsten Kalnin

Thorsten Kalnin already contributed immensely to the ALE network by his awesome StrategicPlay facilitation of our vision creation session in Madrid. But he not only plays with Lego… He brought car design and manufacturing to ALE2011. His inspiring talk about Wikispeed gave a special touch to the unconference. Nobody could have guessed when he volunteered for the Alien sofa that he would join such an amazing team and be able to tell us about how to use Scrum, Kanban, OO, XP… to build a 100mpg racing car!

Birthday Injection

Chris Matts gave us a whirlwind of Feature Injection, which was surprisingly injected with a birthday party:

Oana's birthday party crashing Chris' talk

Oana's birthday party crashing Chris' talk

He loved it, now being able to join the hall of fame of “worst things that can happen in your presentation”! His talk was awesome, which did not surprise me. Feature Injection and Real Options were the topics I talked about most at this conference, as they greatly improved my understanding of the event’s organisation. Being a central part of it, I didn’t reflect our processes on a meta level, but injecting features into the unconference just before our Real Options expired was exactly what we did. Never commit early unless you know why.

Lean Procrastination

In the afternoon, I was interviewed by Rini van Solingen about LeanProcrastination, which I’ve been co-developing with Marc Bless for about a year. In addition to catalysing a lot of thoughts I had on my mind, he challenged my statement that our method was only for personal work organisation… Connecting my ideas about Real Options and Distributed Cognition to the Beyond Budgeting topic of Bjarte’s keynote, he said it might be a way to help enterprises get rid of their backlogs… Never commit early unless you know why. I’m still thinking about it. This is the video:

In the open space, Ivana Gancheva hosted a session about alternative formats for future conferences. I butterflied in and out though the discussion was amazing, as my daughter came to visit the unconference and I showed her around. Good to have a chance to let your family know what you’re actually doing!

Coding Dojo Icebreaker

Impressions from ALE2011—Day 1

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After my first Thank You last weekend (which I feel inclined to repeat: Thank you all for making it an amazing experience!) I’ll now write up my impressions in a timeline, focussing on my learnings.

The Prepared Bags

Prepared Participants Bags

Preparation

Last Tuesday I went to the venue around lunchtime to meet early-arriving peers for preparation. We went to lunch with about a dozen people, among them Stephen Parry. Since he submitted his talk about the ICT value chain, I was looking forward to meet him. He started the conversation with how we “made him come” to our unconference: He had seen our tweets and looked at our site, and was so amazed by our lean distributed organisation that he wanted to be part of it. And he has great expectations from and high hopes for the network: a power to compete with big consultancies like McKinsey or Accenture, who sell Lean and Agile to Enterprises by guaranteeing to cut costs, which (if it works at all) only enables these to “do the wrong things righter”. We know how to do it differently, we are many, and through our use of social media we get visible. We could get a chance to make a difference!

The afternoon was quickly over with preparing rooms, printing Marcin’s badges, posters and Ivana’s appreciation cards, stuffing 200 bags… (Eelco suggested the bag stuffing should be offered as an extra paid optional Kanban excercise next year. Like that.) More and more people arrived, hugs were exchanged… It felt like a family reunion. Especially the fact that I could now meet all the amazing organisers in person whom I’d been working with so intensely was creating an emotional state that hasn’t fully subsided yet… An inner fire that still burns.

Appreciation Cards

The ALE2011 Appreciation Cards—Thanks Ivana!

When we went out for dinner, we were already more than 20, and all the time people kept arriving. Connecting through Twitter and Foursquare, they found us and joined the crowd… Later in the bar, Oana, Franck, Marcin and I started working on the finalisation of our prezi on the event’s organisation.

I was distracted by the arrival of friends: Ivana, Liz, Chris, Yves… Jurgen gave me a present:–) but we managed to finish the talk prep. Thanks again to Liz for giving me the most effective 5min coaching ever on (her way of) Feature Injection to improve my point:–) I had just discovered (through visual similarity of our organisation with the FI model) that we had actually structured our sofas along the capabilities of our goal… And the sofas pulled features and stories from these capabilities to create an emergent event that couldn’t have been described in advance. Constantly aware of our Real Options and deferring decisions because of budget constraints we let unconventional, unheard-of solutions emerge. More on that in a later post, I’m deviating from the topic…

We finished at 2am. My heart was full of joy, ALE2011 had started.

Morning

I arrived at eight at the venue, bringing my wife Christiane (who joined Monika on the spouse&kids program). The place was already buzzing in Yellow! Our amazing student volunteers had prepared the reception, people just started to come in… And at nine, it started. The amazing Jon Jagger ran a coding dojo icebreaker, getting people moving and coding and laughing and looking puzzled… Amazing, another thank you, Jon! And I’m proud and happy you decided to sponsor ALE2011.

Coding Dojo Icebreaker

Coding Dojo Icebreaker—Look at the Happy Faces!

After that, Rachel Davies started with her Keynote “10 years of Agile—are we There Yet?”. She immediately found the right tone for the audience, and with a provocative statement about Enterprise Agile she inspired discussions that continued throughout all three days… Thank you!

Rachel Davies on Enterprise Agile

Rachel Davies on Enterprise Agile

After the coffee break, we had our talk about the organisation of ALE2011. We started with a bit of confusion for the audience, as we were not actually in the room… Franck was fiddling around with his computer and suddenly we called him on Skype—while he was checking the participants list on Google. We played through a typical evening during the last weeks before the event: check who registers, check who’s paid, skype with the others… and then Marcin, Oana and I entered the room and “really” started our talk:–) Hope the video is ready soon, I want to see how it worked for the audience:–)

Oana, Franck, Marcin and Me talking about ALE (photo by Ivana Gancheva)

Oana, Franck, Marcin and Me talking about ALE (photo by Ivana Gancheva)

Before lunch, I went to Stephen’s talk. He was as amazing as expected—I wrote about it already. Lunch was great, as all service in the NH hotel… And then, there were lightning talks. I can’t actually remember, will have to wait for the video:-) But the audience was fascinated:

Fascinated by Lightning Talks

Fascinated by Lightning Talks

I mostly butterflied during Open Space. The atmosphere was engaging, familiar, interesting… I remember some specifics: Rini van Solingen asked me for an interview… I talked with Chris Matts and Olav Maassen about Real Options… Still astonished that Chris was interested in the way I use my keys for risk mitigation.

Real Options Smiling

Real Options Smiling

I had to leave early that evening for a company meetup. As so many agile42 colleagues came to Berlin for the event, we used the chance to meet and have dinner:-) More on the next day tomorrow!

Thank You

Thank You For ALE2011

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As you may have noticed, during the last months I’ve been part of an amazing team that organised a conference.

The event is called ALE2011 and just finished last Friday. It was amazing. I’m still trying to sort my thoughts and learnings, and I do not want to compare it with other (un)conferences, but the organisation was definitely the best project I was ever involved with.

Thank You

Thank You!

Before I start to get into the details of the organisation in a later post, why and how it went so well with such an amazing emergent outcome, I need to thank a lot of people, for their efforts, understanding, passion and patience.

  • The biggest Thank You goes to my wife, Christiane, who supported my work in the team with patience, passion, and, especially in the final phase, with a lot of work. I couldn’t have done this without you.
  • Thank you, Marion, that you supported the idea of agile42 supporting a European conference in Berlin from the moment I suggested it, and for all the effort our office and I have been putting in its support, especially all the accounting. That was much more than just sponsorship.
  • Thank you to all the sponsors. I’ll explicitly mention three of the here: Nokia ovi.maps, J.B. Rainsberger and agile42. Without their early commitment we wouldn’t have been able to even start. I’m still impressed we found more than 25 sponsors… You deserve your own post.
  • Thank you, Marcin, Marc, Oana, Franck, Ivana. We’ve been this organisation’s heart and bones together, and I’m especially grateful for your friendship, guidance, patience and passion when times where tough. And of course for the many hours of work…

View Original on Prezi

  • Thank you Marc, Sven, Eelco, Franck for your work on the participants sofa, through multiple levels of registration, payments, reminders, more reminders…
  • Thank you Catia, Eelco, Alex, Pablo, Sven, for being first-moment committers and sharing our distributed leadership, although some of you could not be there this week.
  • Thanks Alex and Aleksey for their great work with our website ale2011.eu!
  • Thank you to Greg & Greg and their student volunteers: You’ve made this event run smoothly and you sorted out so many things we hadn’t thought of before… Great Job!
  • Thank you Nick, Natalia, Ivana, Christian, Wolfgang, Jaume for you work with integrating the European communities. Your hard work paid off!
  • Thank you Jule, Micheal, Michael, Pablo, Christian for your work on the press release and its translation…
  • Thank you Jurgen, for the idea and for getting me on board from the start… For the trust, vision and a dream to realise.
  • Thank you, Mike, for the facilitation of our Open Space. And for luring me into this community…
  • Thank you, Sergey, for the basecamp administration, for gentle guidance and coaching on the way.
  • Thank you, Ken, for the retrospective facilitation. And for your spontaneous help with the kids…
  • Thank you, Monika, for the preparation of the Spouse&Kids program, and your amazing energy and passion to carry it through.
  • Thank you Monika and Christiane, for missing so much of the official program to be with the kids. You had a hard time as you had to work with the most unknowns. Thanks for making the best of it! This unconference got much of its shine and awesomeness from your work.
  • Thank you, Ken, Will and Andrea, for finding so many industry topics and talks.
  • Thank you, Erik, for creating the Exciter sofa. Thank you Jens for the excitement on the way—sad you could not come.
  • Thank you my dear friends Melanie, Mike, Ivana, Katrin and Gitte for coming. I still can’t fully grasp that I met you all at once.
  • Thank you Liz, Chris, Olav for Feature Injection, Real Options, Distributed Cognition, Deliberate Discovery and more ideas that made part of this endeavour possible and the emergent outcome mostly understandable… And for the Love.
  • Thanks to Bjarte, Rachel, Dave for the keynotes, Jon for the coding dojo and all the speakers…
  • Thanks for all the hugs, thank yous, best wishes and congratulations. You are most welcome!
My Sofa

Thank you Silvana for the sofa!

  • Thanks for any other kind of support, thanks to everybody I did not mention because you just skipped my attention while writing this, thanks to all who came… Each and every one of you has made this a bit more special to me.
  • Thank you Katrin, and all the staff at NH Hotel Berlin Mitte, for making this possible and supporting our lean organisation in the most flexible way.